Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
Today is the 101st anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, the greatest public miracle since the Resurrection. Given the gravity of the current crisis in the Church and its relationship to the message of Fatima, I would like to repeat more or less verbatim the text of our newsletter of July 13, 2017, to once again highlight the importance of the Fatima message in relation to the mission of the Kolbe Center and explain why it is of the utmost importance that all who believe in our mission work and pray for the complete fulfillment of Our Lady of Fatima's request for the consecration of Russia by name to her Immaculate Heart by the Pope and the Bishops of the Catholic Church.
On July 13, 1917, Our Lady told the children of Fatima that if mankind did not repent and her requests were not heeded, "Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church." On October 13, 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, Almighty God worked the "Miracle of the Sun" to show that the message of His Mother to the three little children of Fatima was urgent and true. Seventy thousand people - including many who had come to scoff - witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Seventy thousand people who had been soaked to the skin by hours of pelting rain were instantly warmed and dried, clothing and all, at the Blessed Mother's visitation.
Just weeks after the Miracle of the Sun, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladmir Lenin had been born into a Christian home but lost his faith as a teenager and embraced evolutionary materialism. On his desk sat a sculpture of a chimpanzee sitting on a pile of books, including Darwin's Origin of Species, contemplating a human skull. Lenin coolly sat in the presence of that sculpture, overseeing the murders of millions of innocent people, all in the name of evolutionary progress. Lenin's successor as communist dictator of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, also lost his faith in God as a seminarian after reading Darwin and Lyell and embracing evolutionism. He oversaw the murder of more than twenty million people - all in the name of evolutionary progress. When communism spread to China, Mao Tse Tung's forces held compulsory seminars in every town they captured, not in the teachings of Marx, Lenin, or Mao - but in evolutionism - because, in the words of Passionist missionary bishop Cuthbert O'Gara, evolutionary theory could be used to destroy people's faith in God, in the soul, and in the after-life, and communism could then take root in the minds of the people.
The evolutionary hypothesis provided a rationale for communist movements all over the world. It also provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the eugenics movement in the United States, Germany and elsewhere, leading to large numbers of compulsory sterilizations of "less fit" people. Evolutionary "science" was used to justify the work of the Birth Control League and the dismantling of taboos against any kind of sexual perversion - since evolutionary theory proved that humans are descended from sub-human primates and therefore what is natural for sub-human primates is also "natural" for humans. Evolutionary theory was used to justify genocide in the German colony of Namibia in the early twentieth century and to justify the ideology of the Nazi party which took power in Germany in 1933. Within Germany, evolutionary science was used to justify euthanasia of the "less fit" and the cruel medical experiments of Dr. Mengele upon living human beings, all designed to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak. According to Adolf Hitler, the purpose of the Nazi Party was to advance evolution.
Today, the communist and Nazi ideologies are no longer taken seriously in most parts of the world, but evolutionism taints the very air we breathe from one end of the earth to the other. Of all the errors that have "spread throughout the world," none has endured or spread as successfully as "evolutionism," which in its theistic form has been embraced at the highest levels of Catholic government and academia. With the propagation of theistic evolution, most Catholic young people in the once-Christian nations of the world are taught to scoff at the sacred history of Genesis and are taught instead to believe that the god of evolution used hundreds of millions of years of death, destruction, deformity and disease to evolve the bodies of the first human beings in the wombs of evolved sub-human primates.
In 1929, Our Lady came to Lucia in a convent and asked for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart. Lucia relayed the request to her bishop, but Our Lady's plea was not heeded, and, in 1938, World War II erupted during the reign of Pope Pius XI with the Nazi invasion of Austria. Since then, several Popes have spoken of the importance of the Fatima message and have made Fatima consecrations of various kinds, but none of them has fulfilled Our Lady's specific request for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by the Pope with all the Bishops.
In 1981, Pope John Paul II miraculously survived an assassination attempt on the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. As he recovered from his wounds, the Holy Father reviewed the Fatima messages and resolved to go to Fatima to thank the Blessed Virgin for saving his life. On the feast of the Annunciation, 1984, in the presence of 250,000 faithful, Pope John Paul II invited the bishops of the world to join him as he consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary - but again without a specific mention of Russia.
Significantly, during the consecration the Pope departed from his prepared text and begged Our Lady to enlighten "the peoples of which You Yourself are awaiting our consecration." These words were included in an official account of the consecration published in L'Osservatore Romano on March 26, 1984 and in a similar article in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops. With these words the Holy Father acknowledged that the mention of Russia had been deliberately omitted from the prayer of consecration. On several occasions during the next five years, Sister Lucia confirmed that the 1984 consecration had not mentioned Russia and therefore did not fulfill Our Lord's request. Cardinal Alfons Stickler and Cardinal Paul Augustin Mayer also confirmed this in an interview in 1987. Nevertheless, in 1989, Father Coelho reported that Vatican officials had ordered Sister Lucy to reverse herself and to assert that the Consecration of Russia had been performed. From that day until Sister Lucy's death in 2005, various statements were attributed to Sister Lucy to the effect that the 1984 consecration had fulfilled Our Lord's request for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But no firm evidence has yet been produced to show that she or the Pope himself believed that the consecration of Russia had been performed. On the contrary, the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the peoples "awaiting our consecration," to use Pope John Paul II's words, are still awaiting it.
Cardinal Bertone, the former Vatican Secretary of State, has claimed that the consecration of the world by Pope St. John Paul II in 1984 fulfilled Our Lady of Fatima's requirements. However, this cannot be the case for several reasons.
In the first place, it is not possible to consecrate a nation or a person without naming the nation or the person.
In the second place, Jesus insisted on the consecration of Russia to His Mother's Immaculate Heart so that the world would know that the conversion of Russia was the fruit of that consecration. This intention cannot possibly have been fulfilled, since Russia has not been converted and has not returned to communion with the Catholic Church. It is estimated that no more than seven per cent of the Russian people attend Church services every Sunday, while the country as a whole is wracked with organized crime, political corruption, violent persecution of independent journalists, alcoholism, abortion, pornography, and prostitution. It would be blasphemous to call this the "conversion of Russia" promised by Our Lady of Fatima.
Finally, Biblical history and Church history prove that God's commands must be obeyed precisely to attain His promised rewards. When Naaman the Leper was told by the Prophet Elisha to wash seven times in the Jordan River, he asked his Hebrew servant why he should wash in the Jordan when he had better rivers to wash in back home. But when he obeyed the command of Elisha, he was healed instantly. When Archbishop Zumarraga of Mexico City obeyed Our Lady of Guadalupe's precise instructions - conveyed through Saint Juan Diego - to build a shrine in her honor on Mt. Tepeyac, eight million Indians converted to Christianity in the next ten years. In the same way, when the Pope obeys the specific requests of Our Lady of Fatima, Russia will be converted and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
It is important for every Catholic to understand that just as the failure to heed Our Lady of Fatima's requests led to the spread of evolutionism throughout the world, so will obedience to her requests and the consecration of Russia by name lead to the rapid eradication of evolutionism from the face of the earth. It is therefore of the utmost urgency that everyone who participates in the mission of the Kolbe Center live their consecration to Jesus through Mary, pray the Holy Rosary every day, practice the devotion of the Five First Saturdays, and plead continually for the consecration of Russia by name to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope and all of the Bishops as soon as possible.
I would also like to point out that in 1929, when Our Lady came to ask for the consecration of Russia, the boundaries of Russia included the territories of the contemporary states of Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. Therefore, it would make sense to pray and petition for the consecration of Russia by name, but also for the consecration by name of these countries whose lands fell within the territorial boundaries of Russia in 1929. There is a special urgency to pray and plead for the consecration of Russia and Ukraine, by name, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, since both of these great nations are descended from the great Catholic kingdom of St. Vladmir of Kiev and both appear to be destined by God to be a light to every nation on earth in the times to come. It would be tragic if out of understandable bitterness over the mistreatment of Catholics in eastern Ukraine, the Catholics of the whole Ukrainian nation were to forswear or to cease praying for the complete fulfillment of Our Lady of Fatima's request for the consecration of Russia. This would indeed be diabolical, since these great Catholic countries which sprang from a single root at the end of the first millennium are destined by God to return to their former unity and to become a light to every nation on earth at the dawn of the third millennium.
In closing, I feel compelled to make a comparison between the widespread contempt for the literal historical truth of the historical books of the Bible on the part of so many contemporary Catholic theologians and the ease with which so many Catholic intellectuals accept a consecration "of the world" as a fulfillment of Our Lady's explicit request for a consecration "of Russia." According to the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, the absolute truth of the facts set forth in historical books of the Bible must be accepted without question by all Catholics. St. Thomas sums up the mind of the Church in these words:
It is unlawful to hold that any false assertion is contained either in the Gospel or in any canonical Scripture, or that the writers thereof have told untruths, because faith would be deprived of its certitude which is based on the authority of Holy Writ (St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, Part 2 of the Second Part, Q. 110, Art. 3) (emphasis added).
Pope Benedict XV summed up the constant teaching of the Church on historical statements in the Bible in Spiritus Paraclitus as follows:
Those, too, who hold that the historical portions of Scripture do not rest on the absolute truth of the facts but merely upon what they are pleased to term their relative truth, namely, what people then commonly thought, are - no less than are the aforementioned critics - out of harmony with the Church's teaching (emphasis added).
Therefore, when the genealogies of Genesis state that Adam lived 930 years, that statement does not need any interpretation. Catholics are required to believe in "the absolute truth" of that fact. It is not "protestant" to do this. To argue that it is "protestant" to do this is to fall into modernism, as it is the modernists who first took the position that historical statements in the Bible could NOT be taken as "absolute truth" without a Magisterial definition.
This digression is relevant to the correct interpretation of Our Lady's request for the consecration of Russia for the following reason. Just as it is not within the competence of the Pope, the Bishops, or Vatican administrators to tell the faithful that Adam did NOT live to be 930 years old when "the absolute truth" of that fact is guaranteed by virtue of its being set forth in a genealogy in the "sacred history of Genesis" - so is it beyond the competence of the Pope, the bishops, and Vatican administrators to tell the faithful that the explicit requirement of the Blessed Virgin in a private revelation that has been formally approved by the Church authorities and endorsed by every Pope for the last seventy-five years does not mean what it plainly says.
I am not saying that private revelation is on the same level as Divine Revelation. Far from it! I am saying that the same pernicious attitude that deceives so many Catholic intellectuals into thinking that they can pass judgment upon the truth or falsehood of - and in doing so completely reinterpret - facts whose "absolute truth" is already guaranteed by virtue of their inclusion in an historical book of the Bible has created a perverse atmosphere in which an explicit request for the consecration of Russia can be reinterpreted as a request for the consecration of the world on the say-so of a Vatican Secretary of State. I am arguing that without the acceptance of the former error, it would be impossible for so many Catholic intellectuals to fall into the latter.
It is especially disturbing when Catholic intellectuals who claim to defend the traditional teaching of the Church accuse the Kolbe Center of "protestant fundamentalism" because we maintain the attitude of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church toward the sacred history of Genesis. We have just posted a response to a critique by Fr. Paul Robinson, FSSPX, who accuses us of this very thing, but who rests his case against us, not on authoritative Magisterial teaching, nor on the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors, but on the fallible consensus view among secular natural scientists and on the status quo in the theological manuals of the early twentieth century when modernism had already established a foothold in Catholic seminaries in Europe and North America.
Allow me to close with an analogy, inspired by the claim of two cardinals quoted anonymously some years ago, who stated that Pope St. John Paul II did not consecrate Russia by name because he did not want to "offend" the Russian Orthodox. (If this letter were not already over-long, it would be easy to prove that, rightly understood, a heavenly request for the consecration of a country is the highest compliment that could ever paid to that nation!) Let us consider the case of a devout Catholic couple who care for the elderly father of the lady of the house in their home. The elderly man who is dying of cancer is vehemently anti-Catholic and swears violently whenever a priest enters the house, but the head of the household and his wife continue with their normal prayers undeterred by the old man's negative outbursts. One day they agree that they should ask their parish priest to consecrate their home to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, pleading especially for the conversion of the dying man and making reparation for his blasphemies.
In response to their request, however, the parish priest takes counsel with his assistants who advise him that any attempt on the pastor's part to consecrate the home in question to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary will provoke the old man to blasphemy and do more harm than good. The parish priest then tells his parishioners that instead of consecrating their home to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, he will consecrate their neighborhood, thus incorporating their home into the consecration but without giving offense to the irascible old man. Now, it may be quite reasonable to say that the neighborhood consecration is a substitute for the home consecration; but one thing that cannot be rationally affirmed is that the neighborhood consecration is the same thing as the home consecration. This would violate the law of non-contradiction. And yet this is what the faithful are asked to believe by those who follow the line of Cardinal Bertone.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is Truth Itself and His Word is Truth. He did not establish His Church or give His teaching authority to the Apostles and their successors so that they could arbitrarily redefine reality but so that they could preserve intact the Deposit of Faith that was handed down from the Apostles. But just as the Pope and the Bishops cannot deviate from the defined dogmas of the Faith, neither can they use their authority to demand obedience from the faithful to assertions about matters other than doctrines of faith or morals when those assertions violate the laws of logic and a common-sense interpretation of the facts. If a Bishop were to say that a man could marry two women at the same time, his statement would have no authority whatsoever. And if the same Bishop were to say that Senator Ted Cruz is a Senator for New York and not for Texas, in contradiction to the plain facts, he would have no more right to demand our acceptance of his erroneous assertion than an ill-informed school-boy. The request of Our Lady of Fatima for a consecration of Russia by the Pope and the Bishops is a straightforward proposition, the authenticity of which has been vouched for by every Pope for more than a hundred years. As followers of the Truth incarnate, we have a right and a duty not to allow that request from our Heavenly Queen to be subjected to a "harmful mutation" - even if the one inflicting that mutation is a prince of the Church.
Just think of it! When the consecration of Russia is performed according to Our Lady's request, the imminent eradication of evolutionary errors from the face of the earth will be assured. Isn't that reason enough to live the message of Fatima and to pray and plead continually for the consecration of Russia?
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
P.S. For an outstanding defense of Scriptural inerrancy from a Catholic perspective, I highly recommend John Wynne's book The Catholic Teaching on Scriptural Inerrancy, available on the Kolbe website as an e-book or in printed format.
